Virtual Reality Gaming Is Serious Business at APL

A small group of engineers and computer
programmers in the Lab's Global
Engagement Department is applying
its simulation and visual expertise to
develop educational video games. The
work is part of Learning Games to Go,
an initiative supported by a $15 million
Department of Education grant to Maryland
Public Television to help kids who
are struggling with traditional instructional
methods by using digital learning
games.

The collaboration — which also
includes the Johns Hopkins Center for
Technology Education (CTE), the Education
Arcade at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, several Maryland school
districts, cutting-edge technology developers
and education experts — is at the
forefront of a "serious games" movement
to deliver educational content
through compelling game environments.
Like commercial games, they harness a
child's natural competitiveness and keep
their interest, says Jim Miller, APL's project
manager for Learning Games to Go.

"Kids today learn keyboarding as
early as 4 years old; gaming and interacting
with computers is an everyday
and lifelong experience," Miller says. "If
we can harness the technology available
to make education games compelling
and feature-rich, we could really engage
students so that they don't want to stop
playing or learning."

D. Peloff, the program director of
emerging technologies at CTE, says rapid
improvements in computer graphics
are making it easier than ever to create
detailed, 3-D environments. "The possibilities
are endless in terms of serious
games," he says. "Using virtual reality to
model a real-world environment allows
for experimentation and exploration in
ways that are impossible, expensive or
impractical otherwise."

That's where APL comes in. Miller
has been developing synthetic environments
since 1999, as part of the
Navy's Advanced SEAL Delivery System
Operator/Trainer (ASDS/OT) project.
He has developed synthetic environments
for the Submarine Onboard
Training program, a Web-enabled
simulation prototype and an unmanned aerial vehicle prototype. He and his
team will reuse a sophisticated suite
of frameworks from the ASDS project
to develop a high-fidelity, multiplayer
simulation of a search-and-rescue
operation that will use physics-based
vehicular models and 3-D effects to
achieve a realistic environment.

"The project does have some technical
hurdles that my team hasn't had to
face in the past," he says. "We'll need
to use five or more monitors so that up
to five students can work collaboratively
while interacting with the game. This involves
a distributed rendering approach
that will synchronize the synthetic
environment across multiple computers
while at the same time allowing
each student to independently interact
with the system from their input device,
whether it is a joystick/throttle combination
or a mouse and keyboard."

For the first time, the team will also
have to animate human characters. "The
students will have to interview avatars
[virtual representations of the game's users],
and the avatars will speak, blink and
show emotion in response to questioning
by the students," Miller explains.

Miller says working on this project
has opened a creative door for his team
of engineers.

"Our work really focuses on modeling
and simulation to conjure up a
real vehicle, such as a submarine for
the military," he says. "Most of these projects focus on the ‘driver's education'
aspect of the vehicle and don't focus
on the ‘fun' aspect that a game would
provide. So developing the ‘fun' will be
new for our team."

The team is drawing heavily on the
expertise of APL's mentor students and
college interns. "This influx of young
people really helps keep us older folks
in tune with what is fun for the younger
generations," Miller says.

Ultimately, Miller says, the students
must be engaged and interested for an
educational game of any kind to succeed.
"If a game engages a person for
more than a half-hour the first time the
person plays it, the game will most likely
be successful," he says. "This ‘magical
first half-hour' must grab the student's
attention and compel that student to
keep playing. That's going to be a huge
challenge for us."